Ingrid Doležalová

* 1939

  • "And if we were seeing each other? That was still interesting then, too. Before they were all moved out, I remember there was a demarcation line or something. We weren't allowed to go to Jablonec and they weren't allowed to come to Liberec. And just in Vratislavice there was some kind of a line, an imaginary border, I don't know who made those borders. And there was a restaurant there, and my uncle went there, and my mother and I went there too. That's where we used to hang out, I remember that. But I won't tell you where, I was a girl."

  • "Then in Liberec, [my father] still had his parents, they helped my mother a lot, and in Jablonec he had a brother - he had a big confectionery, a workshop and a shop. He was also German, and he was also deported. And I remember, like today, when they were moved with the pram - he had a daughter - they were also moved to the camp with grandma and grandpa. My mother and I used to follow them, and we always waited to see which carriage they were going to take. I remember that. And then, when they were sent away, they all - my grandfather and grandmother and the brother - went to Schkopau near Merseburg. I don't know how that's possible, that was East Germany, but they got to the same place, which was probably good. And my father was in Russia. I don't know how it happened, so then he got to Germany to see them."

  • "I remember when the Russians came. The first wave, I think it was the first wave, was terrible because I remember they went after women. So my mother was hiding from them in the bushes in the garden. And me and my sister were in the bedroom hiding. But it didn't last long, I remember that. But then the others came and they had a post office in our flat in Pavlovice. They lived with us normally. And they were good. Across the street from our building, Russians lived there too, and they had a kitchen. So we had food from them, so they weren't all bad."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 27.03.2025

    (audio)
    délka: 01:13:47
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

She didn‘t have time to say goodbye to her displaced grandparents, she didn‘t meet her father until she was a teenager

Ingrid Doležalová in 2025
Ingrid Doležalová in 2025
zdroj: Post Bellum

Ingrid Doležalová was born on October 25, 1939 in the Pavlovice district of Liberec, where she lived most of her life. She comes from a mixed Czech-German family. Her father was Walter Neumann (*1908), her mother was Czech Růžena, born in 1909 as Krásná. When the witness was a year old, her father enlisted in the Wehrmacht and was captured in the Soviet Union. After the war, the German part of the family on her father‘s side was expelled from Czechoslovakia: her grandfather, grandmother and uncle. The witness did not even have time to say goodbye to them. They all ended up in Schkopau near Merseburg, where Walter Neumann came to visit them after his release from captivity. Růžena Neumann tried to emigrate with her husband and children, which the authorities would not allow her to do. Ingrid Doležalová did not get to know her father until she was a teenage girl of 12, when he returned to Czechoslovakia. He worked as a master weaver in Hedva, where the witness also worked. In 1961 she married Bohumil Doležal, and they had two daughters. At the time of filming in 2025, she was living in the RoSa residence in Liberec, where she met once a week with friends with German roots to brush up on their German.